In one of its most memorable standalone episodes, Cowboy Bebop lightened up the tone with a hilarious parody of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien. Alien is one of the most iconic movies ever made, with some unforgettable images (the chest-burster springs to mind, not to mention the xenomorph himself), so it gets parodied surprisingly frequently.
Spaceballs ended with another baby xenomorph bursting out of John Hurt’s chest. Bob’s Burgers remade Aliens as a school play with a Freaky Friday body-swap plot. The Simpsons has had some great Alien-related gags, e.g. Santa’s Little Helper chasing Groundskeeper Willie through the vents like Dallas. Cowboy Bebop session 11, “Toys in the Attic,” is one of the most underrated Alien parodies.
Cowboy Bebop’s “Toys In The Attic” Is A Great Spoof Of Ridley Scott’s Alien
Spike with a giant gun in Cowboy Bebop
“Toys in the Attic” starts out on a pretty boring, uneventful day for the Bebop crew. They have no bounty to hunt, and no old enemy has come back to settle a score, so there’s not much to do. But it takes a strange turn when a mysterious blob gets onto the ship and starts infecting the crew with its venom, one by one.
It’s a classic example of a “filler” episode; it doesn’t advance the overarching plot, and it’s not as action-packed as the average episode of Cowboy Bebop. But it’s still a great little Alien story — a mashup of And Then There Were None and a monster-infested B-movie — and it gives us some much-needed time to get to know these characters and their interpersonal relationships.
At this point in the series, the team had only just really gotten together. It takes a few episodes for the show to put Spike, Jet, Faye, Ed, and Ein all under the same roof. Setting a whole episode aboard the ship, where the only antagonist is a creature that evolved from a lobster Spike left in the fridge, puts the spotlight on the dynamics that were forming between them.
Cowboy Bebop’s Alien parody masterfully deflates the tension of the movie by replacing the terrifying, bloodthirsty, vicious xenomorph with a goofy, unassuming alien blob. The creature that evolved from Spike’s unattended fridge is a ridiculous subversion of H.R. Giger’s phallic star-beast.
Cowboy Bebop’s Standalone Episodes Were Even Better Than The Lore Episodes
Cowboy Bebop: Jet in front of spacey background.
Any sci-fi show worth its salt has a good mix of episodes that deal with the overarching mythology, and adventure-of-the-week episodes that stand on their own and explore the world and the characters’ relationships more than the plot. Much like in The X-Files, Cowboy Bebop’s standalone episodes were even better than the lore episodes — and “Toys in the Attic” is testament to that.